László Krasznahorkai, grim Hungarian author whose family hid Jewish roots, wins literature Nobel

This year’s Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to a Hungarian writer whose work offers bleak visions of existence, and whose father hid his Jewish ancestry from him for much of his childhood .

László Krasznahorkai, the 71-year-old novelist and screenwriter, achieved international acclaim for formally daring books like “Satantango” and “The Melancholy of Resistance,” as well as a series of collaborations with the filmmaker Bela Tarr. He is often compared to master Russian novelists like Dostoyevsky and Gogol.

The Swedish Nobel jury called him “a great epic writer in the Central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess.” Another prominent champion of Krasznahorkai’s: the Jewish culture critic Susan Sont